Who at Atlassian thought it was a good idea to remove support for long time text formatting notation

AEM_6b8xbi

For at least a decade, all the implementations of JIRA I have used have supported the text formatting notation documented here; https://jira.atlassian.com/secure/WikiRendererHelpAction.jspa?section=all.  You could enter the notation directly with a text editor while creating a new JIRA issue or adding a comment to existing JIRA.  Atlassian, in their infinite wisdom, have decided to remove that support in their recent JIRA upgrade and now require users to use their clunky GUI editor to access the notation and dropped support for the noformat notation.  In addition, the implementation is inconsistent with the text formatting notation available when creating an issue but not available when adding a comment.  It is infinitely more efficient to create a table using the text editor of your choice and paste it into a comment than attempt to add it using the GUI editor.

Why does Atlassian frustrate a longterm JIRA user by removing useful features like noformat?  With the change, I am resorting to the code tag to highlight data and I have given up adding tables to comments.  I attach .csv files instead which is not a great solution because they now display as text in a popup window instead of automatically opening excel as the previous JIRA implementations did.

I'm giving the recent JIRA update a huge thumbs down and hope they resolve the lack of basic functionality quickly in the next update.

Andy Heinzer

Hi @AEM 

Sorry to hear about your frustrations with the new editor in Jira Cloud.  Please know that Atlassian has not made these changes for the purpose of frustrating users, but rather to help more users.

Over the years, our team has made efforts to build towards a consistent, familiar, and performant editing experience in all our cloud products. We performed extensive research into how our users use our many products together, and found that an inconsistent editing experiences (i.e. Markdown/markup vs rich-text WYSIWYG) when moving across our products resulted in overall confusion and frustration for our users.

We recognize that a number of users such as yourself would much prefer plain-text markup authoring, but the overwhelmingly majority of our customers requested a more modern, rich-text, WYSIWYG editing experience. Unfortunately it isn’t feasible for us to support both experiences, and in balancing the tradeoffs Atlassian opted to support the majority.

What we do support

That being said, we do offer support for markdown in the cloud editor in a few ways:

• Autoformatting: We allow people to type **thing** to make things bold. We used to use wikimarkup syntax but we switched to markdown because it is an industry standard.

• Markdown transformation on paste: We let you type/paste plain markdown/markup text into our editor to help with markdown authoring happening outside our editor.

• In some server instances of Jira, you may still see a "Visual" vs. "Text" selector at the bottom of the editor. There are no plans to support this for the editor in our cloud products.

I understand this is a change from the way you have always used Jira, but I hope that this helps to explain why we made this change.

Andy